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  1. #1
    Join Date
    Dec 2012
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    Preston, England
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    159

    Asterisk And KVM?

    So we run Asterisk on a dedicated box at our Data Center, however it's 2U so we are looking to remove that box and add another box (1U) with KVM virtulization, does anyone have any bench marks using KVM and Asterisk? Any timing issues etc..?


    Thanks!

  2. #2
    Join Date
    Jan 2013
    Location
    Manchester, UK
    Posts
    4
    You shouldn't have any issues running Asterisk on a KVM guest. We run KVM on some of our servers to allow some clients to have their own asterisk instances. We also run our main service on KVM with a modified version of Asterisk running on multiple guests to improve redundancy without any issues.

    We've tested it up to around 100 concurrent calls per virtual machine without any issues.

    It all depends on your hardware at the end of the day. We've been running KVM happily for around 2 years without any problems with asterisk.

  3. #3
    As above, I wouldn't think of running it on anything other than KVM now.

    Couple of proxmox boxes running with drbd on ipmi motherboards and you have yourselves a fully HA solution cheap as chips.

    Rock solid too.
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  4. #4
    Join Date
    Apr 2011
    Location
    Las Vegas, NV
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    1,643
    I'm running an Asterisk box on OpenVZ just fine. The limiting factor is network delay, not server delay. Voice packets are shunted to trunks in pretty close to real time regardless of architecture.

    I did some experiments along those lines before settling on my first production box. I even tried SSD drives. In all cases the location of the data center dwarfed all other factors.

    I finally settled on a data center in Chicago where I get 80 ms pings from Las Vegas. That location proved to be satisfactory for all of North America.

  5. #5
    Quote Originally Posted by ajonate View Post
    I'm running an Asterisk box on OpenVZ just fine. The limiting factor is network delay, not server delay. Voice packets are shunted to trunks in pretty close to real time regardless of architecture.

    I did some experiments along those lines before settling on my first production box. I even tried SSD drives. In all cases the location of the data center dwarfed all other factors.

    I finally settled on a data center in Chicago where I get 80 ms pings from Las Vegas. That location proved to be satisfactory for all of North America.
    Thankfully, we don't have problems regarding latency like that probably due to our geographical size. I hit our datacenter at 5 or 6ms and from my server its only 0.5ms to my carrier, make sure you factor that in too in the US. No good getting a local datacenter if your carrier is 200ms away.
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  6. #6
    Join Date
    Dec 2006
    Location
    Cardiff, Wales
    Posts
    803
    We find about 5 KVM vps's as a max per node in terms of ratio for reliability. This was a i5, 8gb ram machine.
    SIP Trunking and VoIP Lines, Numbering (DIDs and DDIs), Low Cost Minute add-ons, Secure SIP and VoIP. Business and Enterprise Grade Quality, Low Cost and Highly Competitive. Available at: https://www.voipyonder.com/

  7. #7
    Join Date
    Sep 2011
    Location
    USA
    Posts
    278
    We also run our own Asterisk on kvm without any issues.

  8. #8
    Join Date
    Jan 2008
    Location
    Chicago, IL
    Posts
    338
    We use both KVM and OpenVZ for our Asterisk and Freeswitch instances, and both work very well. With OpenVZ, its important to import the DHADI modules from the hardware node, and after that is done you have full use to conferences and other modules requiring timing control. With KVM, its as simple as install and use.

    Good luck
    Ian Halliday
    nDeviX Corporation
    www.ndevix.com
    Web Development | IT Consulting | Hosted Services | Mobile Apps

  9. #9
    our customers mostly prefer to run on openvz with our pre-configured os, as well as our own use voip VPS.

    i think we should give a try to kvm too to see how well it perform and the differences among kvm and openvz.
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  10. #10
    Join Date
    Aug 2004
    Posts
    34

    My asterisk is running on ESXi

    4-6 guest per esxi host is what we find work well for us

  11. #11
    Join Date
    Jul 2012
    Location
    Houston
    Posts
    262
    Quote Originally Posted by SarahA View Post
    So we run Asterisk on a dedicated box at our Data Center, however it's 2U so we are looking to remove that box and add another box (1U) with KVM virtulization, does anyone have any bench marks using KVM and Asterisk? Any timing issues etc..?


    Thanks!
    We run Elastix as voip server under kvm without any problem.

  12. #12
    Sorry, a subject about asterisk and kvm, but someone used asterisk with xen virtualization, what problems can arise?

  13. #13
    Join Date
    Aug 2005
    Location
    PA
    Posts
    324
    Concerning KVM with Asterisk, my recommendation is that you:

    a) have enough RAM so that swapping is not much of an issue (swap after all VMs loaded and running should be under say 3% of your RAM - on a 32GB machine, 1B or less should be swap)

    b) change the tuning on the KSM shared page daemon to ensure that it is not doing so much scanning of pages, that it is burning CPU and affecting responsiveness. Since Asterisk is a long-lived process you won't get a big benefit by lots of frequent scanning, it is OK if it takes longer to find the initial pages to share.

    c) be sure that the OS you install in the VM is recent enough that it runs well under KVM. Older versions of Linux can use up 5-10% of CPU while idle; but new versions such as Debian 7, CentOS6.x, that work well with KVM will use perhaps 0.5 to 1% of CPU while idle.

    Asterisk under Xen - I don't think you will have many problems, it runs fine for 50+ VMs with different Asterisk installs, on a company I know of.

    Asterisk under OpenVZ - I have known of cases where it works well and cases where it does not. It is a little more finicky, however, is the feedback I got from the sysadmins that were in charge of keeping things running.
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